[RESOLVED] ASCII only OR preserve spaces?

[solitario]

Hello all. I'm looking for a PHP script which will remove all but ASCII characters. The following script would be useful, except for the fact that it takes out spaces as well:

php
$string = "This is some text and numbers 12345 and symbols !£$%^&";
$new_string = ereg_replace("[^A-Za-z0-9]", "", $string);
echo $new_string;
// returns: Thisissometextandnumbers12345andsymbols 

Any help is appreciated.